Mythologies and Mad Songs is the culmination of an intense three year burst of creativity during which I wrote all of the works on this disc. It represents, in that sense, a kind of sonic document – a tangible record of my love of the orchestra and the universe of sound and color it provides, as well as a snapshot of some of the things that inspire me, from Shakespeare, Blake and Kafka (and the mythology and magic of their works) to the extraordinary longing for exploration deeply embedded in the human spirit. I remember the first time I saw David Scott’s Puck Fleeing from the Dawn – a work from 1837 now held in the National Galleries of Scotland. It spoke directly to my love of Shakespeare and that play, but also to the fascinating concept of what might have happened after the curtain came down. Dreamlike. Yet also bursting with energy. The music came quickly (and it isn’t always so obliging….).
Mad Song, the second work recorded here with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, has a similar vibe but a very different source of inspiration. Words not images. But images fashioned from words. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience lit my love of poetry in college. I have been looking for a way to write a Blake-inspired work ever since. And this is it. The text of this Mad Song (included below) speaks for itself – riveting, harrowing, full of passion and madness. Who wouldn’t want to score that? Seize my brain, indeed.
The longest work on this disc is inspired by the shortest text – Kafka’s treatment of the Prometheus legend. I loved his concise retelling of this story from the moment I saw it. Each of the four lines of Kafka’s poetry draws out a movement of this work (with a coda expressing the lingering and inexplicable mass of rock that remained) for bass clarinet and orchestra premiered by the Philharmonia at Royal Festival Hall. It was a magical night for me and in many ways ignited the period of creativity captured on this disc.
The outlier may appear to be ICE – aut inveniam viam aut faciam (I shall make a way or find a way). After all, it isn’t inspired by a work of art – or is it? Think of it as a response to the art of exploration. The extraordinary events surrounding the exploration of Earth’s poles – and the poles themselves, at once magical and supremely unforgiving – have always fascinated me. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance inherent in the almost frantic race to reach such stoically unchanging destinations. It is also not lost on me that one of the scores I fell in love with at an early age was Vaughn Williams’ Sinfonia Antartica – a score that somehow sounded cold. I hope mine does, too.
What a privilege it has been to work with Martyn Brabbins, these soloists and these world class orchestras. A special thanks to everyone at the BBC and BBC Radio 3 for their support of this project. I am deeply honoured to share the results with you now.
Geoffrey Gordon, March 2024

PUCK – fleeing from the dawn (for orchestra) (2017)
Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, is introduced in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the “shrewd and knavish sprite” and “that merry wanderer of the night”, and is the figure in English mythology who personifies the wise and mischievous elf. Magical and charming, the knavery and frolic of Puck is imagined in this exhilarating orchestral tone poem inspired by the 1837 Romantic oil painting by David Scott (1806-1849), as featured on the cover, which fancies an imagined scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that might follow the curtain fall: in the last scene, Puck enters the palace of Theseus after all the mortals have retired for the night and says:
“And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate’s team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic.”
Emmanuele Bernier of Bachtrack, called PUCK – fleeing from the dawn, “An impressive work, expertly orchestrated and with apocalyptic accents….” on the occasion of its North American premiere.

Mad Song (for English horn and orchestra) (2020)
An early work of English poet, painter, engraver and visionary William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827), Mad Song was probably first published in Poetical Sketches, 1783, and remains one of his best known and most highly regarded poems. The text expresses the deep anguish and spiritual delirium which saturates the Romantic soul. Blake’s poet is tormented by the daylight of a newly dawning day (light doth seize my brain With frantic pain) in a world of grotesquely personified nature (the wild night weeps, the mad winds roar, the earth scorns, clouds are fiends…). And it is from this tormented vision that the music of this Mad Song emerges. The three stanzas correspond to the three movements of Gordon’s highly expressive and virtuosic (for the soloist and the orchestra) work. Mad Song was commissioned and premiered by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, with soloist Dimitri Mestdag and conductor Eduardo Strausser – Queen Elisabeth Hall, Antwerp, Belgium, 17 and 18 November 2022.
Mad Song by William Blake
The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.
Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.
Like a fiend in a cloud
With howling woe,
After night I do croud,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas’d;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

ICE – aut inveniam viam aut faciam (for orchestra) (2019)
“Aut inveniam viam aut faciam” – I shall find a way or make a way. This quote is etched into the legacy of explorer Robert Peary, credited with the first successful journey to the North Pole in 1909. A harrowing expedition – the last of a remarkable eight attempts – Peary’s trek to the frozen pinnacle of the Arctic North (an adventure he survived, despite monumental odds against that outcome), links him inextricably – in this work as well as in the history of exploration – with another explorer, Ernest Shackleton, and a journey to the Antarctic begun two years before, in 1907. Although Shackleton, by all accounts, came up just 97 miles short of his destination in 1909 – a point reached two years later by Roald Amundsen – his (and Peary’s) extraordinary spirit of exploration is nevertheless inspirational and is the source of inspiration for this music.
“We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders.
We had reached the naked soul of man.”
Ernest Shackleton, Explorer (1874-1922)

Prometheus (for bass clarinet and orchestra, after Kafka) (2018) is inspired by the short story by Franz Kafka, based on the Greek legend:
There are four legends concerning Prometheus:
I. According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
II. According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
III. According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, the gods forgotten, the eagles, he himself forgotten.
IV. According to the fourth, every one grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable. Franz Kafka (1917)
This is the recording of the premiere of Prometheus, featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra, from Royal Festival Hall, London, with conductor Martyn Brabbins and soloist Laurent Ben Slimane, recorded 19 January 2019. This work was co-commissioned by the Philharmonia, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. Terry Blain of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reviewing the US premiere, called the work “striking” and “expressive” – imbuing “an element of dignity on the suffering Prometheus, tracking his gradual obliteration from public memory through a twisting solo cadenza to the unsettling memory-wipe of the piece’s fade-to-black conclusion.”